


Touch of Gray

by Sholio



Category: Iron Fist (TV)
Genre: Artists, Friendship, Gen, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-22
Updated: 2018-12-22
Packaged: 2019-08-21 12:38:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 493
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16576649
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sholio/pseuds/Sholio
Summary: Ward is still trying to figure out who he is in the post-Harold era. This is one of his experiments.





	Touch of Gray

**Author's Note:**

  * For [beyond_belief](https://archiveofourown.org/users/beyond_belief/gifts).



_My brother was a halfway decent artist when he was younger. Our father told him that drawing pictures was a waste of time, and that was pretty much it._  


* * *

Ward buys a sketchbook in Kuala Lumpur, a simple little spiral-bound one, and some pencils. It's something to do in the evenings, in hotels and hostels, when he's not on his phone trying to put out fires back in New York. (Less and less, these days. Katie has turned out to be good at running the company in his absence. He might just put her in charge.)

His first drawings are clumsy, childish -- little more than scribbles. He finds himself trying to hide them, tilting the page so Danny can't see what he's doing, or waiting to bring out the sketchbook until Danny is elsewhere. He draws whatever is nearby to draw (the lamp by the bed, the rumpled heap of Danny's battered old duffel, his own shoe because why the hell not) and none of it looks the way it's supposed to. He remembers how effortless and fun this used to feel -- before his dad found out about it -- and he doesn't know how many times he almost quits and just throws the damn sketchbook in the trash. It's sheer contrariness that keeps him going, the chance to stick it to his dad one last time. _Waste of time, huh, Dad? I'll goddamn waste my time any way I please, because you're dead and you can't stop me._

Danny -- annoyingly perceptive as always, at least when it comes to certain things -- doesn't say anything about it for days, until he brings it up out of the blue one night in a shared rental room in a suburb of Bangkok. Danny has been meditating, or at least that's what he was doing the last time Ward looked at him, but Ward gets caught up in drawing the details of the rumpled blanket on his bed, until Danny says, "You used to draw when we were kids, didn't you?"

Ward looks up. Danny is now sprawled on his bed with an open travel guide in front of him, but he's looking curiously at Ward. And Ward thinks about not answering; he thinks about telling Danny it's simply none of his business (because it isn't). 

Instead he says tersely, "Yeah. A little."

"I thought I remembered that. You were good at it."

"Dad didn't think so." It just slips out. Goddammit. He quits in the middle of drawing the rucked-up blanket-edge, which looks like a bunch of scribbles anyway, and flips to a fresh page. Just another unfinished drawing in a book that's increasingly full of them.

"Is that why you stopped?" Danny asks quietly.

"No, I got busy with _useful_ things."

He doesn't draw any more that night.

Two days later, he finds a box of colored pencils shoved into the top of his backpack.

Danny is an asshole. 

(But a goddamn sweet little brother.)


End file.
